


Check Yes or No

by cinderlily



Category: American Idol RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-12
Updated: 2010-04-12
Packaged: 2017-10-08 21:51:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/79860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cinderlily/pseuds/cinderlily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You want me to do WHAT? Pass him a note with a check yes or no?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Check Yes or No

**Author's Note:**

> Started as a ficlet for the awesomeness that is the Fic Train for the prompt: "Archie gets another AI to see if Cook likes him", then I posted the ficlet and people pointed out it wasn't finished. So 2000 words later? Its finished. Hope you like it. I owe [](http://openice.livejournal.com/profile)[**openice**](http://openice.livejournal.com/) for a lot of things, but for this I owe her thanks for the encouragement and the read thru to tell me if I was massively off course.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**Current mood:** |   
weird  
---|---  
**Current music:** | David Cook::Bar-ba-sol  
**Entry tags:** |   
[cook/archuleta](http://cinderlily.livejournal.com/tag/cook/archuleta), [fics](http://cinderlily.livejournal.com/tag/fics)  
  
  
It had taken him two weeks to build up the courage, another four days to find time that he could be alone on the bus with him with out prying ears around, and twenty minutes of awkward stuttering to actually get the question out so David wasn't quite sure what was so funny. Jason, however, was laughing so hard that his face was tinged with red and his dreadlocks swung back and forth in front of him. 

David crossed his arms in front of him, slightly annoyed but more embarrassed than anything else. "I can just ask someone else if you..." 

"No!" Jason croaked and put his hand up to ask for a minute. With a few gulped breaths he finally got his laugh under control. "Sorry, Archie. I just. You want me to do WHAT? Pass him a note with a check yes or no?" 

He slumped back against his chair and fought the urge to melt into the floor. "NO! Just.. ask him, you know? Cause he is..." he couldn't quite figure out the right word so he made a weird roll of his hands instead. "And I just... he says that I am like his brother and I well... I don't want to be that and ... gosh." He felt the tips of his ears warm and waited for the next fit of giggles from Jason but they didn't come. 

After an awkward moment or two he looked up from where he had been considering his hands to find Jason giving him a strange look. 

"What?" 

Jason put up his hands, "Nothing, man. But I think you probably should do the asking yourself."

"I can't do that," David felt his eyes widen. "What if he... I mean, he can't... I am me. And he is you know... **Cook**." he groaned and added, "This was a stupid idea." 

"No, it wasn't," Jason patted his shoulder. "And don't do that, Arch. Give the guy some credit here." 

David worried at his lower lip. Jason did have a point, he guessed. Cook was awesome; he would take it in stride. He just wasn't sure if he could take it if Cook just took it in stride. The idea of him knowing that Cook didn't feel the same way rather than just thinking he didn't kind of made his stomach feel the same as it did when his mom drove too fast over speed bumps. Like it was hollow and shoved right up underneath his Adam's apple. 

Before he could ask another question or even just bow out and act like he had been joking with Jason, the door to the bus opened and Cook, Carly and Michael stepped up with huge smiles and bags full of food. 

"Honey, we're home," Michael cracked a grin. "And we brought the bacon!" 

David put on the closest thing to a smile he could manage and shifted closer to Jason so that Cook could sit next to him on the couch. When they had left to get food he had been starving but when Cook handed him a sandwich he took a bite and then put it back on its wrapper. 

"You okay, Archie?" Cook gave him a concerned smile. 

Jason gave him a small nudge with his elbow to the side of his ribs and he jumped a little, which got him stares from the other three people on the bus. He coughed to cover it up. "I'm fine?" 

"That wasn't really that convincing," Cook said, and he placed his burger onto its wrapper as well. 

This was already feeling like a disaster but David figured he was on the edge of the cliff, why not jump? He cleared his throat and lifted the sandwich again just to have something to do with his hands. "Maybe we can talk after dinner?" 

"Of course," Cook furrowed his brow. 

"So, day off tomorrow?" Jason prompted and when Michael started to talk animatedly David forgave Jason for laughing at him. 

When dinner was done Cook stood up and pointed towards the back, "Let's go." 

David swallowed around the lump in his throat and threw a look at Jason that begged for him to throw him a rope. Jason gave him a smile and two thumbs up for encouragement. As he went to stand up Jason leaned a little towards him to whisper in his ear. 

"If all else fails, you could just write him that note." 

David didn't respond. Instead he got up and walked towards the back of the bus, not daring to look back for fear that the offer of writing a note would be too tempting.

Cook had a habit of taking up more space than David thought was possible to explain with physics. He was tall, yes, much taller than David himself but when he wanted to he just seemed to take over a room with limbs and a relaxed grin and just his presence in general.

This though, wasn’t that time. When he passed the little divet in the wall that held the sliding screen door to separate the bunks from the living room in the back of the bus Cook looked almost small in comparison to the room. Like he was folded up in on himself. Like, David worried, he knew what was coming and had braced himself accordingly.

“Cook,” David started, fidgeting a moment with the partition before he could get it to close behind him.

Cook shifted over to the side and let David sit beside him, even though the other two walls had places he could have sat instead. “What’s up, kid?”

“Don’t call me that,” he surprised both Cook and himself with the snap in his voice. He looked down at his hands and tried again, “I mean, um. Please? Don’t call me that. That is going to make this… harder.”

_Like it isn’t hard enough. _ David added silently.

“Okay, sorry Archie,” Cook amended.

And just like with Jason he suddenly lost the proper line of what he wanted to say. He stuttered for a beat or two, tried out a sentence and then rejected it. When he was little his mom said his brain sometimes went faster than his mouth, and if there was ever a time that was true it was that moment.

Cook’s hand landed on his knee and he jerked to look at him. “Hey,” Cook tried. “You are freaking me out here.”

“Oh,” he paused, his eyes glued to his leg where Cook’s hand was kind of rubbing a soft circle. He got that he was trying to be comforting but it was definitely more of a distraction than anything else. “Sorry.”

When Cook didn’t respond he figured it was kind of expected for him to just spit it out. His mind had quickly cycled through all the ways he could say it but none of them seemed to sound like they came from an adult.

“So I have been kind of thinking about this a lot lately and I know that it is totally out of left field.., and I don’t expect you to agree with this or even think you did anything to, you know, make this happen or anything. Its pretty much all me, but I think that maybe if I tell you it might help? You know? To make it go away, you know?”

Cook’s eyebrows were furrowed. “Archie, man, I can pretty much categorically say I don’t know even a little.”

David felt the blush as it started at the back of his neck. “Oh. Gosh. Okay, um. Sorry. I’ll try again?”

“That is probably a good idea.”

He swallowed and forced himself to look up at Cook’s face, and even though he had to focus on his forehead to get the words out he still thought it was a step in the right direction. “I kind of … like you?”

Lame, totally and absolutely, ninth grade school dance pressed against the opposite wall LAME. Cook smiled, his face relaxed for a split second. “Yea Archie, I like you, too.”

“Yea, that’s great,” David chickened out, plastered on a smile and put his hands on his knees to stand up and make a break for it. In the middle of doing that Cook stopped him with a tug to his elbow.

“Wait,” he paused, “You really think I am going to believe that you had to take me back here to tell me you like me?”

David sighed, “I kind of hoped you would.” Cook didn’t seem amused by the try at a joke and he mumbled, “Maybe it’s more than like?”

“More than like?”

“Maybe a lot more than like?”

Cook seemed to consider that and David silently pleaded that he didn’t want him to say more than that. He already felt like a silly teen on the best of the days, he was pretty sure that anything he had to say was just going to make the whole situation worse.

(_When we hang out my stomach kind of hurts, but in a good way? And the reason why I laugh at your stupid jokes isn’t because they are funny but because when you tell them you get this smile that is so happy its infectious?_)

To his relief he doesn’t get asked to explain, but instead Cook gave him a serious stare. “You know, you have kind of been around me nonstop for a year now.”

“Yea?”

“It could just be a proximity thing,” Cook wasn’t looking at him and that was probably just as well because he could feel his features screw up in frustration.

“Its not…” his voice started to crack a little, and he had to pause to stop it. “Its not because you are around. I don’t like Michael. Or Carly. Or even Jason.”

Cook nodded, “But you got breaks from them.”

“I got breaks from you!” he gritted his teeth. Why was he being so frustrating? “And when you weren’t around I missed you. Not like I missed them, different. I … I …_gosh_ I _ached_.”

As soon as the words left his mouth he regretted them.

“This was such a stupid idea,” he rolled his eyes and stood up fast enough that Cook couldn’t have stopped him if he wanted to. He wanted to storm off but the stupid partition stuck again. He muttered and shook it back and forth. “Open, dang it!”

Cook’s hand landed on his and stopped him from his assault of the door. His voice was soft and almost fond, “The door didn’t do anything to you, Archie.”

David turned around to yell or maybe just to glare but Cook was **there** and the room wasn’t that big and somehow Cook had switched back into his usual full presence and David lost track of his anger. Cook leaned down and pressed a soft kiss to the center of his forehead and then pulled back and kissed him on one of his cheeks. When he pulled back a last time David almost saw what was about to happen. He held his breath and closed his eyes at just the last moment before they kissed.

“Wha?” David tried to ask as Cook pulled back to breathe a while later.

Cook looked down at the floor, and David wasn’t sure he had ever seen Cook so shy in private before. “Me too. I mean… I ached too. When you weren’t around.”

“Really?” it came out as a high pitched squeak but that just made Cook laugh.

“Really.”

When they kissed again there was a catcall from behind the partition.

“CALLED IT!” came Castro’s voice. “Pay up Johns.” 


End file.
